The Burning (5 page)

She had bonded with Rachel and Adam and was sure that they felt the same way. She wanted to protect them, but there was no denying that they were the most important scientific find of the century. Maybe the most important scientific find
ever
. The project needed to keep the kids under control, she accepted that, but they had insisted on keeping them sedated for
four
days already while they did
the scans. Today had been the twins’ first day awake, and Laura could see that Rachel and Adam were disorientated and not quite up to speed. Laura had protested but the project was still tranquilizing their food. At least they had agreed to reduce the dose.

She slammed the lid of her laptop closed and stared at the wall. This wasn’t archaeology; this was a violation of the kids’ rights. Their childhoods had been hijacked, and she knew that she was one of the hijackers.

She’d thought her life would be very different…

She remembered the sun-bleached days of her own childhood in Perth. While her sister had played with dolls, Laura had walked around the yard in Subiaco, giving the rocks names and memorizing every dinosaur from the Triassic Period to the Cretaceous.

Even then, she had known that her future would revolve around her obsession with the past.

She remembered hunting for fossils, and how that had got her interested in the Aboriginal sites, the Songlines and the Dreaming stories. Invisible maps of the ancient landscape that the tribesmen kept alive in their heads or in songs and stories. They held the past, the present and the future in their
minds
. In time she had become intrigued by sacred sites in other parts of the world: in caves and long-forgotten tombs, in Bronze Age burial-grounds.

And one day, some odd pieces of information had started to add up.

That had been when the American guy at the University of Western Australia had approached her to work for the Hope Project. He’d read a few of her papers and had said that they were working along the same lines. In return for open access to her work, the Hope Project had offered Laura complete freedom to continue her research wherever she chose, saying it would open doors for her where necessary.

As someone who hated the red tape involved in gaining permission to dig foreign sites, Laura had welcomed the access-all-areas ticket that the Hope Project had seemed to offer. And while it had never been a priority, it had to be said that the large sums of money which appeared in her bank account overnight had made a big difference to someone who had lived on educational grants for ten years. Looking back, it had seemed like a golden opportunity.

And now she was complicit in the drugging of children.

Laura opened her computer again. She checked her email and then clicked on to her webcam. She was glad to see Rachel up and about and pacing her room, rather than lying dormant as she had been for the past six hours.

Laura watched for a few minutes. She slurped at the coffee she’d made earlier, but it was stone cold.

Rachel appeared to be looking for something, waving her hand in front of light bulbs and the air-conditioning vent. She looked as if she was searching for a bug … or a camera. No sooner had Laura thought it, than Rachel spun round and looked up to the corner of the room and stared
straight into the hidden lens of Laura’s webcam.

Laura Sullivan felt herself flush hot, exposed, as Rachel climbed on a chair, then, waving a single finger in front of the camera lens as if to say “caught you,” plugged up the spy hole with a wad of chewing gum.

Laura let out a sigh of annoyance as the picture on her screen went black; at the same time, she felt a sneaking admiration for Rachel that was stronger than the irritation. There was no keeping a good girl down, she thought. Maybe she
did
need sedating a little longer.

Like the others had.

R
achel slammed the door behind her, furious at having discovered the spy camera, and angry at herself for not having discovered it sooner. She had felt for a while that she was being watched. It was no less than she had expected really, but still, to have it confirmed enraged her beyond belief. Could she trust no one? She was surprised to find that her room hadn’t been locked.

She stormed down the corridor, rapped on her brother’s door and threw it open without waiting for an answer.

“They’re spying on us, Adam!” she shouted, knowing full well that Adam’s room would be wired too. “Adam…?” She stepped into the room, but her brother was missing – his messy bed the only evidence that he had ever been there at all. Rachel slammed the door closed again and stamped off along the hallway that Laura had taken them down when they’d gone for breakfast.

Turning right towards the older part of the building, Rachel suddenly found herself face to face with a woman
in a white lab coat. The woman, who was no taller than Rachel, looked shocked and backed against the wall, fumbling in her pockets for a set of small earphones and trying to avoid eye contact.

Rachel glanced at the double doors that led through to the kitchen and which could only be opened with a passkey.

Her anger made her bold.

“Open that door for me, please,” she said to the woman. The woman looked frightened. She tried to avoid Rachel and slip round her, but Rachel cut off her escape with her own body. “I said, open the door! I’m not a prisoner; I’m a free person!”

The woman looked up briefly, her eyes darting left and right, trying frantically to avoid Rachel’s gaze. “We’re not… We’re not meant to talk to you.”

She tried again to escape, but Rachel dropped her shoulder and barged the woman back against the wall.

“Where’s Adam? Where’s my brother?” Rachel grabbed the back of the woman’s short, bobbed hair, pulled her head back and glared straight into her face.

“Please! We’re not even meant to
look
at you,” the woman said.

Rachel gave the short hair a good yank. “Open it.
Now!
” She pulled the hair again for good measure, talking close; looking hard into the woman’s eyes. Suddenly the resistance went from the woman’s body. She ceased struggling and turned calmly back towards the door, swiping her passkey in the slot on the wall.

“There you go,” she said, pushing open one of the doors, before smiling weakly at Rachel and continuing on her original path as if nothing had happened.

Rachel stood in the open doorway and watched her go. She was astonished at the sudden capitulation and felt guilty for the violence she’d used to make it happen.

“Sorry!” she shouted. But the woman didn’t look back.

Rachel walked on down the corridor and into the empty kitchen. Mr Cheung’s head appeared from behind the plastic curtains of the walk-in larder.

“Hi, Rachel. Hungry?”

“No, thank you,” Rachel said briskly. “I’m looking for my brother.” She continued past the breakfast bar and headed for the swing doors that led out of the kitchen on the other side.

Mr Cheung tensed, and stepped towards her. “Rachel, I’m sorry … I don’t think…”

Rachel held up her hand imperiously, silencing the chef, then pushed through the double doors.

They led through to another part of the building, clearly older, with a thickly carpeted floor and pictures on the wall. Rachel could smell woodsmoke and hear faint classical music coming from somewhere at the end of the passage.

She followed the sound to an open doorway. Inside, the room was large and comfortable, with a roaring log fire and huge, over-stuffed armchairs and sofas. On the mantlepiece over the fire sat several antique-looking clocks, their
workings exposed beneath glass domes. Glancing around the room, Rachel could see contraptions and mechanical figures of varying shapes and sizes perched on shelves in alcoves on either side of the fireplace. Sitting in one of the big chairs, behind a coffee table in front of the fire, was a middle-aged black man. He raised his head to look at her and smiled.

“Hello, Rachel,” he said. His voice was a comforting, low rumble: a reassuring voice, an
American
voice. The man stood up and gestured for her to join him at the fireside. “Shut the door, would you?”

Rachel did as she was asked and stepped forward tentatively.

“Hi, Rachel,” her brother said, his head popping over the back of the chair that had been concealing him.

“Come and sit down,” the man said. “I’ve just been getting to know Adam a little. I’m Dr Clay Van der Zee.” He held out his hand. “I guess I’m what you would call Head of Research here at Hope. Welcome.”

Rachel shook his hand, noticing that it was smooth and dry and that his fingernails were very clean.

He ushered her into a richly upholstered chair next to Adam. “Well, your brother’s got me well and truly beat,” he said. He pointed to a board game set out on the table in front of him.

Adam grinned.

“It usually takes smart people at least eight attempts to
figure this game out,” Van der Zee said. He shook his head in mock amazement. “Adam’s getting it in two.”

Rachel recognized the game, or at least the
type
of game. There had been a version of it at the holiday house they used to stay in at Cape Cod. The board had had ten rows of four small holes. In one row, a player would set up a code of four colours using pegs concealed behind a small shield. Then his opponent would try to guess the hidden combination by placing coloured pegs into the remaining holes on the board. The colour code could be worked out logically, by a process of elimination. But this game looked more difficult. There were six colours to choose from, which meant that there were virtually endless permutations. To get it in two would be sheer luck … or something else.

“Adam’s always been good at that kind of thing,” Rachel said. Adam nodded, not about to contradict evidence of his own genius.

“How about you, Rachel?” Van der Zee said. “Fancy a game?” He turned the board towards her. “Hide your eyes, I’ll set one for you.”

Rachel felt childish covering her eyes while the man shielded the coloured pegs with his hand. When he was ready, he tapped her on the knee enthusiastically and nodded. Rachel looked up into Van der Zee’s dark eyes. He reminded her of a spaniel: a little sadness dragging at the corners of his eyelids, but warm, friendly and eager to please.

“Ready when you are, Rachel,” he said.

She stared at the empty peg holes on the board. No clues. She closed her eyes. She thought for a moment, then, as her pupils adjusted to the darkness behind her eyelids, colours began to glow: pulsating and forming sequences like traffic lights. As Rachel concentrated, the colours settled into a row: red, green, blue, yellow, red again and purple.

Rachel opened her eyes and looked at the board.

“Go on,” Adam said. “I think I know it already.”

Rachel picked up some coloured pegs from the box in front of her and placed them in order: red, green, blue, yellow, red, purple.

Van der Zee smiled to himself as Rachel’s pegs went into the holes. Nodding, he lifted the small screen, revealing the same order of pegs that Rachel had placed on the board. Adam looked at his sister, a little disappointed that he had been bettered.

“In one,” Van der Zee said. “Fantastic guesswork, or should I say, intuition?”

“Whatever,” Rachel said, shrugging. Her gaze darted around the room, trying to disengage from the insistent eye contact of Van der Zee, who seemed forensically interested in her every breath and blink. “Why do you have so many clocks?” she said, trying to change the subject.

Van der Zee beamed. “They just fascinate me,” he said. He stood up and gestured at the mantlepiece. “Each one is different. Their shapes, their sizes. But no matter how
different they are, all those cogs work in harmony together to keep things regular, to keep the world on track. Individually, each cog is useless, but put them together and they become something else.” Van der Zee meshed his fingers, making a nest of his hands and looked from Adam to Rachel. “Some clocks may have painted faces, disguising what goes on underneath; a blank exterior that gives no idea of the cogs tirelessly working away. But I particularly like these ones, because I can see how they work.”

“I bet you’re never late,” Adam said, attempting one of his feeble jokes. Rachel winced.

Van der Zee laughed indulgently. “It’s not so much the timekeeping I’m interested in; it’s mechanical things synchronizing. Every little component is as important as the big wheels in making the whole thing tick. Look at these…” He directed them to the shelves on the left of the fireplace, to what looked like a collection of old dolls and mechanical toys.

“This one’s real old, about two hundred years,” he said. He pointed to the figure of a small stuffed monkey in a silk waistcoat sitting on a stool and holding cymbals in its paws.

“Is it a
real
monkey?” Adam asked.

“No sir,” Van der Zee said. “It’s what we call an automaton. Man-made. Like a little robot. I guess the fur might be real; most likely from a rabbit. It’s French, I think. Look.” Van der Zee pressed a lever in its base and something began to whirr
and click. The monkey’s head jerked sideways as if looking at them through black, glass eyes.